Related papers: Functionalising the wavefunction
This chapter reexamines wave function realism (WFR) through the lens of phenomenology. We begin by situating WFR within the broader debate about the ontology of the quantum state and the temptation to "read off" metaphysics from…
In this paper I review three different positions on the wave function, namely: nomological realism, dispositionalism, and configuration space realism by regarding as essential their capacity to account for the world of our experience. I…
This is the first of four papers prompted by a recent literature about a doctrine dubbed spacetime functionalism. This paper gives our general framework for discussing functionalism. Following Lewis, we take it as a species of reduction. We…
Scientific realism is the philosophical stance that science tracks truth, in particular in its depiction of the world's ontology. Ontologically, this involves a commitment to the existence of entities posited by our best scientific…
Realism -- the idea that the concepts in physical theories refer to 'things' existing in the real world -- is introduced as a tool to analyze the status of the wave-function. Although the physical entities are recognized by the existence of…
This paper focuses on a constructive treatment of the mathematical formalism of quantum theory and a possible role of constructivist philosophy in resolving the foundational problems of quantum mechanics, particularly, the controversy over…
Dimensional analysis provides many simple and useful tools for various situations in science. The objective of this paper is to investigate its relations to functions, i.e., the dimensions for functions that yield physical quantities and…
The main claim of the paper is that one can be 'realist' (in some sense) about quantum mechanics without requiring any form of realism about the wave function. We begin by discussing various forms of realism about the wave function, namely…
It is generally argued that if the wave-function in the de Broglie--Bohm theory is a physical field, it must be a field in configuration space. Nevertheless, it is possible to interpret the wave-function as a multi-field in…
The mathematical structure of realist quantum theories has given rise to a debate about how our ordinary 3-dimensional space is related to the 3N-dimensional configuration space on which the wave function is defined. Which of the two spaces…
Roughly speaking, functional analysis is the study of vector spaces of arbitrary dimension over the field of real or complex numbers, and the continuous linear mappings between such spaces. Naturally, the notion of continuity requires a…
Dimensionality reduction represents the process of generating a low dimensional representation of high dimensional data. Motivated by the formation control of mobile agents, we propose a nonlinear dynamical system for dimensionality…
One of the major concerns of Schr\"odinger, Lorentz, Einstein, and many others about the wave function is that it is defined on the $3\mathbf{N}$-dimensional configuration space, rather than on the $3$-dimensional physical space. This gives…
We propose a new class of generative diffusion models, called functional diffusion. In contrast to previous work, functional diffusion works on samples that are represented by functions with a continuous domain. Functional diffusion can be…
The results presented in this paper are refinements of some results presented in a previous paper. Three such refined results are presented. The first one relaxes one of the basic hypotheses assumed in the previous paper, and thus extends…
This paper examines the physical meaning of the wave function in Bohmian mechanics (BM), addressing the debate between causal and nomological interpretations. While BM postulates particles with definite trajectories guided by the wave…
This is a tutorial introduction to the functional analysis mathematics needed in many physical problems, such as in waves in continuous media. Functional analysis takes us beyond finite matrices, allowing us to work with infinite sets of…
What ontology does realism about the quantum state suggest? The main extant view in contemporary philosophy of physics is wave-function realism. We elaborate the sense in which wave-function realism does provide an ontological picture; and…
Emergence (macro-level effects from micro-level causes) is at the heart of the conflict between reductionism and functionalism. How can there be autonomous higher level laws of nature (the functionalist claim) if everything can be reduced…
We introduce the response function (RFs) approach to model the weak lensing statistics in the context of separate universe formalism. Numerical results for the RFs are presented for various semi-analytical models that include perturbative…